Tracking the Gender Balance of This Year’s Music Festival Lineups

Even a quick scan through this year’s festival lineup posters reveals a gender imbalance, with female artists scarce among the larger font sizes. To look even deeper, we converted those lineups into data—logging the nearly 1,000 artists booked at 20 of this year’s biggest multi-genre festivals (primarily focusing on American fests) and ranking them according to their placement on each poster.

When we ran the numbers on music festivals last year, the gender disparity was glaring: Only a quarter of artists booked across 23 of the summer’s biggest fests were female or groups with at least one female member. Earlier this year, a group of 45, mostly non-U.S. festivals pledged to book gender-equal lineups by 2022. But where do we stand in 2018, and how much further do music festivals need to go to reach that goal?

Gender Balance

The charitable take on gender equality in the festival world is that it’s getting better. But it’s still got a long way to go. Based on the 19 fests we tracked in 2017 and 2018, female representation has increased from 14 to 19 percent, while the percentage of groups with at least one female or non-binary member, held relatively steady at 11 percent. Of course, that still means that seven out of 10 artists on festival bills are men or all-male bands.

But when you break down gender balance by festival, the results are more varied. In 2017, not a single festival reached the 50/50 male/female threshold. In 2018, three make it: FYF, Pitchfork, and Panorama. On the other end of the chart, Firefly, Bottlerock, and Bunbury barely clear the 20-percent mark when it comes to female and mixed-gender acts in 2018, though Bunbury at least doubles its female artist numbers over last year… from one to two.

We also broke down the numbers to see whether particular genres correlate with better gender balance. Of the top five best-represented genres, booking more electronic, hip-hop, and indie artists generally means more female musicians, while more rock- and pop-oriented fests drive more male-heavy lineups.

In a year with few female headliners outside of one-offs such as Beyoncé, Björk, and Lauryn Hill, 2018’s festivals are still very male-heavy in the upper tiers of their lineups. For some fests, you have to read through multiple rows of artists before you find the first female or mixed act; at Lollapalooza, for example, Chvrches is the first non-male act on the poster, listed 15 spots from the top.

Slicing the data to look at just at the top 10 percent of artists from each festival by poster billing spreads the results even wider, with five festivals above 50 percent female or mixed, and four fests (Sasquatch, Boston Calling, Shaky Knees, and Bunbury) at zero—that is, entirely male in the largest font-size categories. (You can re-sort festival lineups by gender and other criteria using this interactive graphic.)

But to circle back to the more optimistic perspective, nearly every festival did improve their gender balance numbers from 2017 to 2018. Of the 19 festivals for which we have two years of data, only Governors Ball and Pickathon decreased their percentage of female artists, in both cases only marginally (Pickathon actually has one more woman than last year, but booked more acts overall). If trends across festivals continue, gender equality should eventually happen—but maybe not by the 2022 deadline.

Uniqueness

Aside from gender, uniqueness—or, more specifically, the lack of uniqueness—is another problem area for summer fests. In early January, as seemingly every festival announced a lineup topped by Eminem, the usual resurgence of complaints about festival similarity followed right on cue. Since 2016, we’ve used some fancy math to compare festivals on their uniqueness, with a score that gives them more credit for booking artists that are playing fewer festival dates this summer.

Festivals that focus predominantly on a single genre tend to do better on this metric, and this year’s winner by a healthy distance is Pickathon, which is well stocked with folk artists. On the other end, Governors Ball dropped to dead last this year, swapping places with last year’s least-unique fest, Boston Calling.

On the artist side, if you want to see dramatic rockers Manchester Orchestra this year, you’re in luck—the Atlanta band is at nine of the 20 festivals we tracked this summer; our number crunching also suggests you’ll hear a lot of Chromeo, Odesza, Tyler, the Creator, and Portugal. The Man this year. Meanwhile, our tally of the most powerful festival acts, based on average billing and festival size, rewards Coachella and Lollapalooza exclusives such as Vampire Weekend, Beyoncé, Excision, and Walk the Moon.

If there’s a common thread between the gender balance and uniqueness data, it’s that smaller festivals tend to do better on both. That dynamic suggests what could be the biggest problem with the modern festival scene: The events that can afford to take the biggest risks—the ones that sell out or come close before their lineups are even announced—often don’t. While some mid-size festivals develop their own unique character, many more emulate the industry leaders or are operated by shared promoters, creating regional mini-Coachellas that carry over or amplify systemic biases. For a brighter festival future—as measured by gender balance, genre diversity, or just plain variety of acts—the deep changes will have to happen from the top down.